PPI is a researcher, producer and developer of multi-touch display solutions. It was founded in 2006 by Jeff Han and shipped its first Multi-Touch Workstation and Multi-Touch Collaboration Wall in 2007, which changed the way CNN covered the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections.

“The acquisition of PPI allows us to draw on our complementary strengths, and we’re excited to accelerate this market evolution,” said Kurt DelBene, president, Office Division for Microsoft. “PPI’s large touch displays, when combined with hardware from our OEMs, will become powerful Windows 8-based PCs and open new possibilities for productivity and collaboration.”

Microsoft could definitely benefit from PPI, since it has an entire new line of Windows Phone 8 and Surface tablet devices being released this year. Microsoft unveiled its 10.6-inch Surface tablet in June, which will feature a 3 mm fold-out keyboard that doubles as a case, a thin 9.3 mm frame, and two complete versions of the tablets: the Windows RT model with a Tegra 3 processor and 32/64 GB SSD options, and the Windows 8 Pro model with Intel Corp's Core i5 Ivy Bridge processors and 64/128 GB SSD options.

“We are incredibly excited to be working together on our mutual passion to build technologies that enable people to collaborate and communicate,” said Han. “By joining Microsoft, we will be able to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Microsoft Office Division, tightly interoperate with its products, and deliver this technology to a very broad set of customers.”

Apple bought Fingerworks for their multitouch technology to produce iPhones and iPadsApple bought Final Cut for use in iMovie now available for the iPad and previously OS XApple bought several mapping companies so they could introduce their own GPS program since Google Maps doesn't allow turn by turn navApple bought Siri for use on the iPhone and iPadApple bought Intrinsity and PWRficient to design their Ax ARM CPUs for their iPad and iPhoneApple bought Lala for use in iTunes Match and their cloud music streaming/storage service

I dunno, it seems to me that they've bought companies for use in their products (which so far seems to be working out wildly successful), with their success indicative of having competitive (as opposed to uncompetitive) products.

Also, suing to ban products is one way you're supposed to use patents, specifically trademarked, registered, or patented designs (all of which apply to Samsung at this point).

I don't know, but did you actualy have a point? Nothing you said deflated anything I wrote. Good try.

Apple buys companies and does not license their technology, UNLIKE Microsoft. Instead, Apple sues its competition to try to delay them because it knows its products are not as competitive.

Apple bought touch technology to try to prevent others from using this technology even though there was years of previous art and products.Apple applied for and erronously received several design and what many judges described as "obvious" patents.

You stand on pretty weak ground if all you can patent is stuff like kinect-type tech on a mobile device instead of a home device. Really? So all Apple thinks it needs to invent is stolen ideas and convert them to be used on a mobile device? These are obvious patents. These are nonsense patents.

Apple did well in the past few years delaying its competition as the courts work very slowly. The backlash of the courts to Apple has already began and they have been made to look like childish brats.

Yeah, my point is that you're wrong regarding Apple's products as "uncompetitive".

Fingerworks was making keyboards. Apple took the technology and made wildly successful smartphones and tablets (and even today they are still ahead of most other companies wrt to GPU, CPU, battery life, and screen resolution), ergo they are in fact competitive.

Final Cut was a pro app that Apple purchased and made available to consumers (first iMacs then down to iPhones and iPads); paired with their generally more powerful CPU/GPUs, this feature is still something most phones aren't really capable of and still a mark of Apple's competitiveness... The same is true of iPhoto, Garageband, and other "artsy" apps Apple has released on their iOS devices.

Intrinsity and PWRficient's purchase has kept Apple's SoC in the forefront of mobile performance and battery life; for a month or two NVIDIA has been able to claim some CPU gains against Apple, but never GPU, and then they are leapfrogged for 10 months at a time, whilst in general having significantly worse battery life than iOS devices. This holds true also with Qualcomm and Samsung. I think the HTC One using a 28nm Qualcomm SoC and the Razr Maxx with a battery 2x bigger than the iPhones are the only devices that come close to Apple's battery life.

The fact that the generate billions of dollars of profits per quarter almost defines their products as competitive, no? Why are they selling in such large quantities if their products aren't competitive?

Their utility patents might be nonsense, I agree, but design patents, trademarks, and copyright are not.

To further expand on the "innovate" part, here's a snippet I wrote for a different thread that applies:2007's "early innovation" was a large touch screen (precluded by RIM's dedication to a hard keyboard, taking up previous space otherwise available to a battery and display) coupled with a capable web browser (also unnecessary on a small screen) that wound up driving data usage even in the absence of LTE, and even 3G. Since one of RIM's early founding tenets was in fact being thrifty with data, there was also a lack of desire to increase data usage.

2008's "early innovation" was the app store which further increased the data usage of the device. While RIM unveiled the Storm, it's relatively poor browser, lack of wifi, and very limited built in storage all posed problems, especially when the App World would be unveiled in the next year.

2009's "early innovation" was a much faster CPU and GPU to further increase a user's investment/interaction with the device, and along the way also drive additional data usage; the Storm 2 would use a much slower ARMv6 CPU compared to the iPhone 3GS ARMv7. RIM failed to release a new Storm, instead releasing the Torch in 2010!

2010's "early innovation" was a dramatically improved camera, front facing camera, much higher resolution screen and limited form of multi-tasking which facilitated additional apps while preserving battery life. Yes, curtailing functionality was a feature. The front facing camera was coupled with FaceTime, but the App Store allowed for third party apps to do video conferencing over 3G, which also increased data usage. At least the Torch's CPU finally matched that of the 3GS released a year prior.

2011's "early innovation" was an even more powerful CPU/GPU (two cores, now!), voice, and even faster 3G networking (all of which continue to increase data usage). RIM responded with last year's CPU at 2x clock, flash storage finally increased to 8gb, or if you stuck with 4gb, a much higher resolution screen on the BlackBerry Torch 9850

Do you see a pattern here? Always a year behind (which, to be honest, was still better than what Nokia/Palm/Microsoft achieved), until 2011 when they started to slip to 2 years behind (dual core, high resolution, next gen BB OS 10 phones in 2013)